On Valentine’s Day last Thursday, I challenged my students to write a love poem without using the word love. On Facebook I had read Charles Ghinga’s poem for his wife Debra. I used it as a mentor text.

After we read this poem, we brainstormed a list of things in nature that could serve as a metaphor as moon does in Charles’ poem. I pushed my students to be specific. Some of the more interesting things they listed:

sunflower
lily pads
stars
swans
sea eagle
grass
northern lights

Page of word groups from Writing Poetry From the Inside Out by Sandford Lyne.

I used a poetry resource by Sandford Lyne called Writing Poetry from the Inside Out. In this book, Sandy writes about “Poem Sketching” with word groups. The back is full of pages of word groups. I photocopied one of these pages to give to my students. Each student chose a word group to write from.

Magic happened. Was it writing about love without using the word? the model poem from Charles? the word groups from Sandy? or the magic that happens when writing in a safe community?

We cut out construction paper hearts and wrote our poems on them to give to someone special. I gave mine to Madison because I used a quote of hers. Chloe gave hers to me, probably because I loved it. And Madison gave hers to Chloe. Poetry gifts from the heart.

She says, “Did you know the sea eagle
has a wingspan of eight feet?”
I write it down in my notebook
realizing that her knowledge
opens the surface
of our classroom
like the blossom of a tulip.
Digging into depths
of learning
makes everyday
as fascinating
as the sea eagle.

I read the above quote in a post from Smack Dab in the Middle. (Image made in Canva) If you are a writer, take a minute to read the post. Darlene Jacobson wrote, “For me, and I suspect for many of us who write for children, EVERYTHING is a miracle.”

I write with children, not just for children, and feel that every time we write together, a miracle happens. Lately I have been writing skinny poems, multiple skinnies a day. I’ve gotten into the rhythm. Starting with a simple line leading to single words is a quick and inspirational way to write. Like haiku, a skinny poem is a short form, but unlike haiku that focuses on a single moment, a skinny can focus on a single thought or idea. (See more about the form on my PF post last week.)

Taking inspiration from the above quote, I wrote the following:

Everything is a miracle
touched
by
God’s
hand
touched
by
my
holiness
touched
by a miracle is everything.

Today, after a stormy day yesterday, the sky is clear and the sun is shining, a daily miracle. There are fields of butterweed blooming.

CREDIT:Jeff Lepore/Science Source

Sunshine is a daily miracle
a
meadow
of
gold
a
glow
of
grass
a
daily miracle in the Sun.

What miracles do you see every day? Can you write a simple skinny poem?

In my classroom, we pick a quote of the day and write it on a clean notebook page. Sometimes the quote leads to writing, but not always. As I write alongside my students, I find the quotes influencing the flow of my pen. As I gear up for the March Slice of Life Challenge, I like that I can find inspiration for writing in quotes.

From my notebook page:

The opposite is also true, Pablo, that everything real is imagined. All meaning comes from our past experiences. Take this writing pen, for example. I watch the teal blue ink flow onto the page. I know that when I form these motions these letters will be created. The practice of my writing creates the writing before me.

Imagine the tiny seed that lies beneath the earth grows minute by minute into a flower you will notice in spring.

Everything you can imagine is real
as
the
ink
here
as
my
hand
moves
as
real as everything you can imagine.

I can’t stop writing skinny poems. The rhythm of them. The simplicity. See directions and more skinny poems here.

Have you gotten a set of metaphor dice yet? Here’s a link to them on Amazon.

I’ve been playing with metaphor dice and the skinny poem form. To make a skinny poem, roll the dice to find your first statement.

I got “Love is a silent blessing.” This becomes line one. Lines 2, 6, and 10 are all the same word. Other lines are only one word long. Line 11 repeats the same words as line 1. Confused? Try numbering your paper from 1-11. Write your metaphor phrase in line one. Choose a simple word for line 2, 6, and 10. Fill in the rest.

Donna is gathering our Spiritual Journey First Thursday posts at her blog. Donna recently moved, so she chose “Home” as our topic for today.

We often look to our church as a spiritual home. But is this the only place where God lives? Like the saying “Home is where the heart is,” God is where the heart is, too. Just because you may not have a place to worship, God’s presence does not leave you. God is in my mind…always.

I also believe that God is in my poetry. Wherever I am, the world opens and reveals poems. This week is only the first week of February, but the temperatures have climbed above 70 degrees, and the Japanese magnolias are blooming. On my early morning walk, I pass a lonely tree in a vacant lot. It’s obviously not trimmed or cared for and in many ways looks like it’s dead, but not this week. So I wrote a poem about it. Of course.

The first stanza is a direct quote from The Time is Now, a weekly writing prompt from Poets and Writers.

ADayonSaturn

A day on Saturnlasts a total of ten hours,thirty-three minutes,and thirty-eight seconds,according to the Astrophysical Journal.

When I pass the Japanese magnolia,I think it must be dying.Lichen clusters on its branches;a hollowed trunk carved like a caveinvites infesting insects.

And yet, there they arein the middle of winter, pinkblossom budspoint to the skyspot Saturn

Last week I collaborated with artist Marla Kristicevich on a workshop for teachers designed around poetry and art collage. The workshop was part of the Arts in Education professional development series held at the Acadiana Center for the Arts.

After I presented about finding elements of poetry in my poem “I am a Beckoning Brown Bayou,” Marla shared how she had taken words from 3 different poems from my book Bayou Song, and circled words that represented an element of art. She then created a magazine collage to reflect those words and images. While Marla’s complete presentation was in a PowerPoint slide show, the part that touched me were the amazing and beautiful collages she had created from my words.

Marla’s collage from interpreting the poem There is Always.

We had 12 dedicated teachers attend, and they enjoyed the time to sit and create with materials from magazines, painted paper, and other scraps. The collages were varied and lent new meaning to the poems we worked with.

Then I led the teachers in writing their own poem by gathering new words from their own collages and selecting a form to use. My hope is these teachers will take what they learned, their joy of playing with words and art, and bring it into their classrooms, but more than that, my poet’s heart was touched by the way my poems from Bayou Song led to more poems.

Collage from “There is Always” by Cissy Whipp.

Cissy’s Poem

Dance/Nature Triptych

I.

My dance is in the way
the leaves calmly curl and crinkle
under my feet.

II.

My dance is in the water
rippling, rising, rushing
around my ankles.

III.

My dance is in the place
between land and water –
the muddy, mysterious marsh.

Finding the poem inside.

Kay chose the I Am form to use when her collage revealed things about herself.

I enjoy learning from other teacher-writers who post on Slice of Life as well as on Poetry Friday. That’s how I met Molly Hogan. She blogs at Nix the Comfort Zone. A few Fridays ago she posted a beautiful original I Am poem. Her ideas for this poem came from poemcrazy by Susan Goldsmith Wooldridge, which is a book I have and value “freeing your life with words.” (Only $3.99 at Abe Books)

When I read Molly’s poem, I decided immediately to use it as a mentor text for my students. We read the poem and noticed so many metaphors. Using colored pens to underline the poetic devices, one of my students said, “This is a very colorful poem,” and she meant that literally.

I am granite grey
plain Jane, sturdy and dependable
but sometimes sunlight shoots across my surface
igniting flecks of mica and quartz
into quick showers of sparkles
here, then gone (Read the rest of the poem here.)

Following our reading and noticing and discussing, I asked my students to turn to a clean page and draw circles. Oh, about 5-7 circles will do. Then we read the poem again. In the first part, she says “I am granite grey.” What is granite grey? A color. Label one circle with color.

As we traveled through the mentor text, we filled in more circles: shape, tree, word, animal, nature, etc. We even made a split circle of inside and out.

During sacred writing time (10 minutes on the Zen Timer app), we filled in the circles with our own ideas and wrote a draft of our own poems.

I know that metaphor is a high-level concept that can take years for younger students to fully grasp, but I dare say that my students got it. Their poems were long and beautiful. Having this amazing mentor text helped greatly. Thanks, Molly, for your inspiration.

Here’s a link to our kidblog site. Please read and leave comments. My students feel such pride when you do. Thanks!

I Am…

I am pink,
chapped and worn,
supple and soft.

I stand on the base of a triangle,
stable, reasonable,
striving for perfection.

In my mind, I criticize–
a checklist of do’s and don’ts
a chapter of why I can’t be.

I am not like the oak
confident in its old age;
I am more of a willow,
seeking, bending in the breeze,
greening in spring.

I search for kind
in your eyes,
your song,
your words.

I do not hunt like the hawk;
I wait and watch like the heron
stepping carefully through the muck.

Taylor Mali developed an innovative set of dice called Metaphor Dice. I have a set that one of my student groups plays with daily. They’ve made it into a sort of game to end each class session. Each of us grabs a set of three dice, white, red, and blue. Roll. Read the resulting metaphor and talk about how it could work. Some of them are challenging to find a real connection. But sometimes you get something intriguing, like “Time is an impossible super hero.”

We also start each notebook writing session with a quote. This week one of our quotes was “The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.” Then I rolled an odd combination: My heart is a well-worn wonder.

These types of activities work well to turn off your critical mind and turn on that right-brain creative soul inside. This is the poem that came out on the page:

A well-worn wonder like a beaten pathas inwe’ve been this way beforeMy heart keeps timewith the meditation tonelike a natural wonder,a miracle of breath& air& bloodpumpingbeatinglivingwaking up!

The poem was shaping up to look like a skinny. I double-checked the rules for a skinny poem. “A Skinny is a short poem form that consists of eleven lines. The first and eleventh lines can be any length (although shorter lines are favored). The eleventh and last line must be repeated using the same words from the first and opening line (however, they can be rearranged). The second, sixth, and tenth lines must be identical. All the lines in this form, except for the first and last lines, must be comprised of ONLY one word. The Skinny was created by Truth Thomas in theTony Medina Poetry Workshop at Howard University in 2005.” The Skinny Poetry Journal

The advantage of having a big kitchen with lots of cabinets is that you have more places to clutter. In my kitchen, not only do I have a junk drawer, I also have a junk cabinet. It’s right at the end of the counter where I place my purse, so it often catches things I take out when I clean out my purse. It catches mail I want to keep and old cell phones, a gift card or two, and so on.

On Monday, I had the day off. I didn’t have much planned, but I definitely wasn’t planning to clean out the cabinet. I’ve been hearing about the art of tidying up as professed by Marie Kondo. I watched a few episodes at my daughter’s house. I haven’t bought the book or embarked on any life changing goals of being more organized.

However, I was looking for something. Tickets to an event this week. I was sure they were in there, but when I started looking, stuff started to tumble. And before I knew it, I was looking at a pile of “junk” on my kitchen counter. I couldn’t leave it there, and I couldn’t put it all back, so I had to sort it all out.

Before…

I found some trash: receipts from two Christmases ago, expired credit card, punch cards from out of business yogurt shops, etc.

I found some treasures: a can of cash that we were collecting for our food pantry, the tickets I was looking for, a gift card to a nice restaurant, and a pair of earrings I had bought for a gift.

Sorting, tossing, finding, remembering…

This was cleansing and satisfying. A really productive winter afternoon. This weekend, the bathroom cabinet.

Do you enjoy cleaning out or do you put it off, like me, until the task forces itself upon you?

Mary Oliver has died and the whole world is mourning. I checked my Facebook page at the end of the day and found that most of my “friends” were posting Mary Oliver’s words. Every one of them connected me to her, to the natural world, and to these people. It was like our own wake, of sorts.

I was introduced to the poetry of Mary Oliver by my good friend Nettie who died this past fall. I imagine they are both writing poems on the clouds. When I was at a crossroad in my teaching career, Nettie sent me the poem Wild Geese. I listened to it over and over and have most of the lines memorized. This poem saved me at a time when I needed to be saved.

I looked on the poetry shelf in my study and pulled out my collection of Mary Oliver books. I found that I have two copies of A Thousand Mornings. If you would like a copy and live in the continental US, leave a comment. I’ll let you know by email if you are the winner.

Mary Oliver had a way of placing you in the moment with her and in a sense, saying a prayer. This poem from A Thousand Mornings places me with her, thinking through things, and noticing with pen in air.

I Happened to be Standing

I don’t know where prayers go,
or what they do.
Do cats pray, while they sleep
half-asleep in the sun?
Does the opossum pray as it
crosses the street?
The sunflowers? The old black oak
growing older every year?
I know I can walk through the world,
along the shore or under the trees,
with my mind filled with things
of little importance, in full
self-attendance. A condition I can’t really
call being alive.
Is a prayer a gift, or a petition,
or does it matter?
The sunflowers blaze, maybe that’s their way.
Maybe the cats are sound asleep. Maybe not.

While I was thinking this I happened to be standing
just outside my door, with my notebook open,
which is the way I begin every morning.
Then a wren in the privet began to sing.
He was positively drenched in enthusiasm,
I don’t know why. And yet, why not.
I wouldn’t persuade you from whatever you believe
or whatever you don’t. That’s your business.
But I thought, of the wren’s singing, what could this be
if it isn’t a prayer?
So I just listened, my pen in the air.

–Mary Oliver, A Thousand Mornings. The Penguin Press, New York, 2012.

I do not presume that my poetry is in any realm of comparison to Mary Oliver’s, but I was moved to write this morning, a way of expressing how her words are written on my heart.

A Misty Mary Morning

I’m walking through a misty world
thinking of Mary. Her words turn
night to day, day to night,
an answer to prayer, a comfort to loss.

She taught me to notice things
like the bird breaking dawn with song.
She would notice the sound
and sing along. I hold hands

with every poet and poetry lover
across the world. We are united
in our collective breath
wishing with Mary for a resurrection

of amazement.

(c) Margaret Simon, 2019

Nikki Grimes wrote this post on Facebook (and gave me permission to repost.)